Even before the Republican Party’s convention had gaveled to order last August, The Washington Post was pronouncing Mitt Romney at best “a transitional figure, rather than a transformative one” within the GOP. That he has since lost the election, and in so doing ceded to President Obama virtually all the battleground states, will do nothing to disturb this assessment. But it would be wrong to see Romney’s failed candidacy as a total loss for Republicans, or for the country.

For all Romney’s limitations as a candidate — his interpersonal awkwardness and propensity for gaffes, his reported preference for data over people and his elasticity on key issues — the man did some things that the Republican Party establishment that embraced him, and the conservative core that never quite did, should both regard, in retrospect, as real gifts.

One was the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate. There are some prominent conservative writers, such as Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, who are already pointing to the tapping of Ryan — the most important decision of Romney’s campaign — as a major mistake, one that “telegraphed his lack of political wisdom.”

Yet in selecting a young, savvy lawmaker who had established himself as the GOP’s driving intellectual force on a major issue, Romney discharged honorably one of the chief duties of the standard-bearer: using the ticket to nurture younger talent, and help the party contest elections well beyond one’s own.

Dwight Eisenhower did this with Richard Nixon; President Obama, with Joe Biden, did not.

The greater gift, however, was Romney’s first debate performance. Never mind that this proved the only buoy for the Romney campaign in the frightfully choppy waters of 2012, and thereby made the election, in its final weeks, a lot more interesting.

The fact is that, with his stellar command of various economic models, Romney in Denver on Oct. 3 delivered the greatest defense of capitalism and free markets that an audience of this size — 67.2 million people — has ever heard. It should be required viewing at business schools for the next 50 years.

With a fluency that eluded Obama, Romney proselytized for growth, trumpeting the benefits of smaller government, lower taxes and enhanced competition.

“The problem with raising taxes is that it slows down the rate of growth,” Romney declared. “More people working, getting higher pay, paying more taxes — that’s how we get growth and how we balance the budget.”

When the subject was health care, Romney again rose to the defense of the free market: “I’d just as soon not have the government telling me what kind of health care I get. I’d rather be able to have an insurance company — if I don’t like them, I can get rid of them and find a different insurance company.”

To this impassioned talk of choice and competition, the American electorate responded with unmistakable enthusiasm, the vast majority agreeing that Romney had won the debate. His electoral fortunes improved correspondingly, if only fleetingly; would, for his own sake, that Romney had maintained this level of excellence in the second two debates.

But who else in modern politics could have turned in such a performance on this issue at all?

One finds it hard to imagine Ronald Reagan, as gifted a communicator as he was, displaying the same fluency, the same command of economics, across 90 minutes of live television; Milton Friedman never faced an audience of 70 million.

This, then, was Mitt Romney’s enduring bequeathal to the Republican Party and the American people. He may yet find new venues in which to give more of himself and amass further successes, of one kind or another, to celebrate.

But even if not, this most gracious of losing candidates will still have performed, on behalf of all champions of our wondrous economic system, a service for which he deserves Americans’ enduring gratitude.

James Rosen is Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent and author of “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.”